Chile vote augurs new possibilities

 

[Three student leaders try to meet with the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, cerca 2012, and are turned away. No matter, the guy on the right is now the president.] 

The first thing many of us noticed about the December 19 second round vote for president in Chile was how eerily closely it tracked the 1988 plebiscite in which the country voted on whether Pinochet should remain in power for another eight years.

 

2021 results: President

Gabriel Boric             55.87% (Apruebo Dignidad-left)

José Antonio Kast     44.13% (Christian Social Front-right)

 

1988 results: Pinochet to remain as president

No                               55.99%

Yes                              44.01%

 

Pinochet lost under his own rules and had to prepare for competitive elections a year later. Or, as the historic headline in the opposition newspaper Fortín Mapocho put it, “He Ran Alone and Came in Second.”

Chile’s electoral system, which assures that the candidate with the most votes wins—quite a foreign concept for some of us—allows anyone to run in the first round, then puts the top two vote-getters into a runoff a month later. (Several Latin American countries vote this way.) Kast, the fundamentalist Catholic who openly admired the Pinochet years, came out on top in the first vote, sending a good half of the country into a profound shock. After all the mobilizations of the last few years, no one could quite fathom how so many people were ready to back someone who didn’t even pretend to regret the horrors of the 1973-1990 dictatorship.

One common feature of the two-step voting procedure, known as ballotage, is that voter participation tends to drop off for the second round. That didn’t happen in Chile, and my impression from this distance is that people hit the streets in an all-out effort to convince their peers and neighbors that this was not the moment for cynical indifference. The estimates for second-round newcomers were something in the 300-400 thousand range, gives the high stakes. In actual fact, 1.2 million new voters showed up. Instead of a cliffhanger, Boric walked away with a crushing victory.

If anyone had funny business in mind to manipulate or dispute the results, the size of the winning margin wrecked those plans. (Something similar may have happened in Honduras, where the non-narco candidate racked up solid margins. Stealing elections is a lot easier when the races are close.) One dirty trick did seem to be playing out when people in many poorer (pro-Boric) neighborhoods found that public transport was suddenly non-existent. We’ll have to wait for more investigation of what happened, but many are suspicious that it wasn’t an accident. In the end, none of it mattered.

Boric came to public attention during the student mobilizations of 2011-13, one of a crop of very young activists who guided that movement adeptly and scored considerable victories. Several of them, Boric included, then parleyed their leadership into seats in the national legislature and have accumulated important experience and credibility, despite active hostility from the right-wing press (essentially all the major outlets). When the “penguin” revolt of high school students erupted in 2018, they were well placed in their senatorial tribunes to echo the popular demands.

I’m too far away from the country both physically and temporally to know much granular detail about Boric’s programs or the constellation of party and institutional forces that constitute his base. That said, I am willing to predict that his presidency will not imitate the disappointing Blair-ite, Third Way, all-hat-no-cattle, more-of-the-same-only-different governments that usually arise after an interesting new political character appears. Nor do I anticipate Venezuelan demagoguery with high-blown rhetoric masking dysfunction and a personality cult.

Despite the parallel with the 1988 plebiscite, the two events are far from equivalent. The NO vote 30-plus years ago was a NO to further dictatorship, NO to the secret police, impunity, disappearances, systematic torture, corruption, and rule by the rich. Beyond that, people were not of one mind and still remained fairly traumatized by the chaotic end of Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-73), which had concluded in the bombing of La Moneda and summary executions. The alternative at that time to more of Pinochet and his regime was a return to the centrist parties, including those that had supported the military takeover out of hostility to Allende. In fact, a major encourager of the coup became the country’s first president after the democratic restoration.

This time around, the choice was far more stark: back to the Pinochet days or a clean break with all the parts of the Pinochet package, not just political repression but more to the point, the economic variety. Boric has promised that Chile, the birthplace of the neoliberal model, will also be its tomb. Those are strong words, and an ample majority of the Chilean population is ready for them to be fulfilled. Education, health, pensions, housing—all the basic components of a decent life, are ripe for a thorough overhaul because after three decades of glowing discourse about the Chilean “success” story, plenty of citizens have seen the well-to-do elite continue to hoover up most of the benefits of economic growth while their own lives fail to improve.

This should be easy for Americans not lost in the pointless babble of our pundit class to grasp. Boric’s victory was a clear repudiation not only of nostalgia for the dictatorship but also of the failure of the two previously dominant political blocs to create conditions so that the majority of Chile’s citizens can have a decent life. These blocs, roughly equivalent to the Democrats and the Republicans here, are now deeply discredited by their failure, and the country has opted for something new. Chile’s political system, unlike our own, made it possible.

Boric comes to power just as the Constituent Assembly is due to wrap up its formulation of a new constitution for the country to replace the 1981 version written under Pinochet’s guidance and designed to sustain an ongoing dictatorship of the private sector, which it has done quite successfully. The new version has the potential of loosening the minority right-wing’s successful block of any threats to its outsized influence.

Chile has long been a social laboratory, and Boric’s determination to bury neoliberalism should be taken seriously. Margaret Thatcher famously noticed Pinochet’s adoption of the Chicago Boys/Friedmanite school of capitalist restoration to reverse the postwar consensus, and Ronald Reagan took a leaf from her book. We have lived with the result for 40 years.

Things often bubble up from the global South, and we tend to be too First World-centric to pay sufficient notice. Chile has deeply entrenched social and economic inequalities, but the incoming team also has the resources to experiment with a fairer system and to face down the inevitable trench warfare that the privileged classes will now stage.

Chile also has the painful memory of the last go-round with a left-wing experiment, and even though the Boric generation is too young to remember it directly, the country as a whole, and especially its leftist currents, has ample collective knowledge of how important it is for them to play their cards just right. In a world sorely lacking in role models, we may be permitted to hope for, to root for, great things.

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Putin Wins, Americans Not Told

 

Amid the blizzard of mis-, dis-, and un-information provided to us by our dully conformist messengers in the news media, one could easily miss the crucial outcome of the latest round of alarmism over Russia: Putin has quietly won his principal demand.

For three decades, Russians have raised hell over NATO’s eastward creep. Gorbachev insisted that the USSR would not oppose the reunification of Germany as long as NATO did not expand, and Bush I promised him that. West Germany duly swallowed up the East, and the hostile alliance promptly accrued former Warsaw Pact states such as Poland and the Czech Republic and added them to NATO’s forward military posture—an early example of the U.S. being “not agreement-capable.” NATO spokespeople openly clamored for more. Georgia (the country) was in NATO’s sights briefly until the Russians reacted. But the big prize was always Ukraine with its enormous Black Sea coastline and the strategically crucial Crimean Peninsula.

Dotting Russia’s borders with military outposts, including nuclear weapons systems that could reach major Russian cities in minutes, has been a wet dream of neocon warriors since the Soviet Union’s collapse. According to some commentators, Putin could have been ousted after the 2014 Ukrainian coup for failing to perceive the threat and prevent it. Apparently, the Russians were shocked at the successful putsch that put a hyper-nationalist pro-Western regime in power in Kiev, and Russia’s dual response—backing the quasi-separatist Russian ethnics in eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea—followed swiftly.

That fighting was stopped by means of a truce and the Minsk Protocol (and its 2015 follow-up, known as Minsk II), which we westerners rarely hear about. That’s because the Ukrainian authorities signed them and then refused to carry them out, no doubt encouraged in this posture by their western masters.

Putin and his patient foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, have been broken records on the subject of what must happen to bring the border tensions to some sort of happy stasis—carry out the Minsk agreements via direct talks between Kiev and its breakaway provinces, achieve some sort of federal modus vivendi among the warring parties, including, crucially, a commitment NOT to put hostile military forces in eastern Ukraine and NOT to contemplate Ukrainian membership in NATO ever.

These Russians demands lie behind the periodic pearl-clutching that our neocon-loyal news media cook up over a supposed Russian scheme to march into the rest of Ukraine. Such a threat is a hallucination birthed in the steaming miasmas of the Potomac, but it conveniently masks the source of hostilities: Washington’s hysteria over losing its accustomed power to dictate terms. Russia’s red line about NATO encirclement means that further NATO expansion will not occur, and Russia is extremely well placed to carry out its threat to stop it should the need arise.

Biden and his amateurish crew of bullies have realized this. While we hear all sorts of dire posturing from Blinken, Sullivan, Biden himself, and a gaggle of nutcases in the Senate (from both parties), they simultaneously acknowledge that the U.S. is not ready to ratchet up to a nuclear confrontation over a rickety, nearly failed state in central Europe.

Meanwhile, the idea that the Russians are plotting to seize more Ukrainian territory assumes that Putin is eager to be saddled with a state on the verge of internal collapse. On the contrary, the uneasy status quo serves Russia perfectly well as they can simply hold out and wait for Kiev to accept the new realities provoked by the errors of 2014—for which, incidentally, the neocon grandees in DC bear a large measure of blame. If Victoria Nuland and her buddies had not encouraged the overthrow of the corrupt but legitimate (i.e., elected) president at that time, the U.S. would not be in the current no-win mess.

The Americans continue to convince themselves that with just a little more aggression, a little more weaponry, a few more ultimata, a bit more butching up, standing tough, insults, and what have you, they will finally force the hands of its adversaries of the moment. Historical lessons from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan leave no trace.

Biden’s video encounter with Putin this week was a predictable dialogue of the deaf, but despite the loyal quotation on every channel here of the script Biden managed to read, Putin came out with a solid win. The U.S. admitted indirectly that NATO will not come to Ukraine’s defense and risk a nuclear confrontation. Our leaders have not yet completely lost their minds—though they’re working hard at it. 

In addition, “further talks” were endorsed, which seems underwhelming until one considers what Putin set out as Russia’s goal: a treaty in which NATO promises to back off. That won’t happen any time soon, if ever, but the fact that the Americans didn’t immediately faint dead away and scotch the idea is a sign of how weak Biden’s position is.

Russia is not worried about further U.S. economic sanctions—the big threat emanating from DC—and is prepared for them in any case. If the Ukrainians go crazy and mount an assault, they will be very sorry as will the European countries facing a new horde of desperate refugees fleeing what’s left of their erstwhile country. Unless some real lunatic gets Joe Biden’s ear, or—heaven forbid—the clueless Kamala Harris gets pushed into a role she is unprepared for, no one in Washington is going to bring on a new geopolitical defeat that would far overshadow that Afghan debacle.

The Americans refuse to grasp the end of the happy days of imperial dictatorship that followed the demise of the USSR. Think-tank chicken hawks must be so bedazzled by all that shiny hardware piled up all over the 800 U.S. military bases scattered around the world that they think its mere existence gives them unchallenged powers. It does not. This week was a tiny defeat for their galactic imperial arrogance: more will follow. The idea that countries might come together to find ways to occupy their respective corners of the globe for mutual benefit seems far beyond their intellectual and imaginative capacities.

Meanwhile, the citizenry is equally unprepared to face facts given the vapid stenography practiced by the herd of “national security” reporters echoing every unsupported assertion emanating from the parallel state at the Pentagon and Langley. The shock of realization once these defeats become impossible to ignore could be surprisingly destabilizing, both a danger and an opportunity.

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